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I think it depends to a large extend on what sort of mud you're trying to create, and what you define as a "class". If by "classes" you mean "professions", then personally I'm against the idea of defining a character's abilities by his profession. I prefer having it the other way around - defining their profession by their abilities. You shouldn't achieve numerous fighting skills by becoming a warrior - instead, you should be considered a warrior because of your numerous fighting skills.
However it's also true to say that many players prefer fixed classes, particularly as they're much faster than customising everything - forcing new players to spend 15 minutes designing their character is going to put a lot of them off. For this reason you might want to compromise by creating a large set of predefined character concepts such as "mercenary", "warrior", "apprentice mage", etc, each of which begin with a number of abilities. New players could then either pick one of these predefined "classes", or create their own. IMO the important thing, though, is not to restrict players by those starting abilities. Once in the game, everyone should have the potential to develop in any direction they wish.
The hard part is preventing people from selecting the "best" skills. To get around that, you may want to introduce things like "talents" (one-off bonuses to specific areas of development that can only be selected during character creation), skill trees/webs (so you have to learn the weaker abilities in a field before moving on to the better ones), skill decay (so unused abilities gradually fade away), etc. In other words, allow people to develop whatever skills they like, but make it impractical to try and master everything - such characters should end up as jack of all trades, but masters of none.
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